Modern famines are put down to bad politics, and Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukraine famine of the ’30s is no different, with the villains of the piece being Stalin and Marxism. The narration is made to tell more: to highlight a case that Rus­sians oversaw unspeakable acts to suppress Ukrainian national self-assertion. In a book that is as much about Russian-Ukrainian relations as the fam­­ine, there is powerful documentation. Half-digested ideas, tendentious arguments, though, make this good non-fiction but indifferent history.

At issue is the ‘Holodmor’ (largescale death by famine) of 1932-33 in Ukraine during the Soviet collectivisation. Ukr­ainian peasant non-cooperation was treated brutally. Forced requisitions of 1932 were merciless. The result was mass shortage and famine.

The Holodmor is important now, but how, where and why raise problems. The anti-Russian western Ukraine cannot have the ‘memory’, as it was part of Poland at the time.

In Applebaum’s book, collectivisation is put down to the Marxism that guided Sta­­lin. This mass dispossession of smallholders and concentration in collectives occ­­urred because Marxists labelled prosperous peasant agriculture anti-Communist and ‘kulak’. This is argued despite Stalin’s support of the entrepreneurially oriented New Economic Policy through the mid ’20s; and the Marxist Bukharin’s steadfast opposition to collectivisation. So, since Bolshevik approaches to Marxism tended to be plural, why collectivisation is put down to Marxism is unclear.

The reluctance to think through the pos­­ition comes from Applebaum’s lack of concern with the famine in a structured manner. Rather, it fits into a larger political argument that while collectivisation was the outcome of Marxism, in Ukraine it was shaped by long confrontation bet­ween Ukraine and the USSR.

The argument is prefaced by a brisk acc­ount of the tension between USSR and Ukraine, dating to the 1917 revolution and before. The background was Ukrainian nat­­ionalism, based on folk tradition and history-writing. This achieved incipient statehood post 1917 and was assertive under Hrushevsky and the Petlyura (until 1920). But the country was taken over by Bolsheviks, after local conflict and peasant insurgency. A famine that rocked the land in 1921 was a dress rehearsal for the 1930s. Throughout, there was little respect for Ukrainian national sentiment in Russia. Applebaum dismisses the significance of ‘Ukraini­sation’ of the region in the mid ’20s, though it’s not clear why. She argues that old tensions remained unresolved.

From 1929, the core narrative follows Soviet collectivisation, with focus on trage­dies from West of Kyiv to Kharkiv in the east. The photographs by Alexander Wie­n­­erberger are powerful too. The cata­strophe is mainly documented through oral testimony, with a patina of archival material. But the impression is uncontestable. Entire villages were wiped out after anti-kulak campaigns. Ukrainian figures point to over 3 million deaths. Though sta­­tistics are unreliable, the scale of the disaster in 1932-33 is beyond question.

According to Applebaum, the Ukrainian experience was exceptional. In 1929-33, local resistance to collectivi­sation was put down to “Petlyuran sabotage”. Under Pos­tyshev, Stalin’s representative, famine was considered the result of sabotage, and remedial measures were minimal. The sabotage was put down to Ukrainian natio­nalism, so Ukrainian leaders were purged. Collectivi­sation and the purges may have been a disaster elsewhere, but anti-Ukrainian sentiment added an edge. The research apparatus that ‘proves’ this case is thin; and the argument is based on statistics that understate the regional impact of collectivisation elsewhere.

Applebaum records a cover-up over the next 50 years, and ritual preservation of memory in Ukraine and in the diaspora. That memory led modern Ukrainian nati­onalism to demand recognition of the Holodmor as Soviet genocide, according to Lemkin’s coining of the term, a demand to which Applebaum is sympathetic.

Clearly, the Holodmor is of contemporary importance—right down to today’s electoral manoeuvres. But how, where and why raise problems. There can be no “memory” in western Ukraine, where anti-­Russian sentiment is greatest now—since it was part of Poland during the Holodmor. Post 1941, major demogra­phic change has marked the country. Clearly, “memory” is constructed by anti-­Russian organisations. Applebaum stands alongside, since the exercise disp­els the cover-­­up of a nat­ional tragedy. One sym­­pathises, but is left in doubt if this tragedy was the result of Stalin’s war with Ukraine, rather than Stalin’s war with all community consciousness in Soviet Eur­asia—except where mediated through his variant of Bolshevik civilisation. At the end, the case that assertive Ukrainians and the Holodmor were to Stalin what the Jews and the Holocaust were to Hitler remains in doubt, and certainly the link to the idea that Russia cannot respect Ukraine.

A conference held on October 4, 2016, in Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine.

The conference certified and established the number of deaths caused by the Holodomor 1932-1933:

· In the Ukrainian SSR, at least 7 million people.

· Outside the borders of UkrSSR –at least 3 million, in the Kuban, the Central Black Earth region, the Volga region and Kazakhstan (my comment, the famine was in predominantly Ukrainian ethnographic territories).

This conference, “Holodomor 1932-1933: losses of the Ukrainian nation”, was organized by:

· the National museum “Holodomor Victims Memorial”,

· the Maksym Rylsky Institute of Fine Arts,

· Folklore and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine,

· the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Ukrainian Institute of Archaeology and Source Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine,

· the Public Committee for the Commemoration of the Victims of Holodomor Genocide

1932-1933 in Ukraine,

· the Association of Famine Researchers of Ukraine,

· the Vasyl Stus All Ukrainian Society “Memorial”, and

· the Ukrainian Genocide Famine Foundation (Chicago, USA)

Other credible witnesses:

What I do not understand is why historians ignore Duranty’s, Stalin’s, and Khrushchev's statements on the Holodomor, as well as the confirming census figures for the Soviet Union. In 1926 there were 31,195,000 Ukrainians within the USSR and in 1939 there were 28,111,000. A decrease of 11%! Whereas in 1926 there were 77,791,000 Russians within the USSR and in 1939 there were 99,591,000 Russians. An increase of 28%!

In 1934 Walter Duranty, a reporter for the New York Times, privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from the famine in the Soviet Union (predominantly Ukrainian ethnographic regions) in the previous year. One should know that Duranty played a major role in shielding this massive horror from the rest of the world. The terror-famine in Ukraine was one of the great crimes of the 20th century.

Stalin told Churchill that 10 million starved to death in Ukraine!

Khrushchev in his memoirs “Khrushchev Remembers” writes, quote “…I can't give an exact figure because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers. ”. Khrushchev knows the numbers. He had intimate dealings with Kaganovich, the Project Manager of the Holodomor Project; they must have discussed it over horilka and salo (vodka and fat back). Khrushchev met Lazar Kaganovich as early as 1917 and when in 1925, Kaganovich became Party head in Ukraine, Khrushchev, fell under his patronage and thereafter rose rapidly through the Party ranks. That is why having close links to Kaganovich, Khrushchev as well as Stalin had reliable Holodomor Famine figures. Kaganovich survived to the age of 97, dying in retirement in Moscow in 1991.

Robert Conquest in his “The Harvest of Sorrow (1986)” with less information than what Snyder has, wrote that the in the famine of 1932-33 there were 5 million victims in Ukraine, 1 million victims in North Caucasus (Kuban the Ukrainian ethnic territory) and elsewhere 1 million (Ukrainian Ethnographic areas) . The total according to Conquest was 7 million Ukrainians victims of the Holodomor.

Historians to be credible must do a good job of explaining away why they ignore credible testimonies of perpetrators and witnesses such Duranty, Stalin and Khrushchev’s statements on the Holodomor, who without flinching say 10 million.

Khrushchev was a protégé of Kaganovich, Kaganovich shared the number of Famine victims with Khrushchev.

If historians are incapable of addressing the testimony of these witnesses, then any number less than 10 million will not be acceptable to the general Ukrainian public.

The review of Anne Applebaum’s book on the Ukrainian famine (Bare Bones of the Holodmor, Mar 5) was brilliant. A conference held on October 4, 2015, in the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kiev—‘Holodomor 1932-1933: losses of the Ukrainian nation’—organised by the National Museum ‘Holodomor Victims Memorial’, among others, certified and established the number of deaths caused by the tragedy. The astounding number came to ten million deaths. Strangely, historians ­ignore statements by journalist Walter Duranty, Stalin and Krushchev on the Holodomor.

The USSR census is also revealing: In 1926, it recorded that there were 31,195,000 Ukrainians; in 1939 the figure was 28,111,000. A dec­rease of 11 per cent! In 1934 Duranty, then a rep­orter for The New York Times, privately ­reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died in the famine in Ukraine. Duranty also played a major role in shielding this massive horror. In his memoirs, Khrushchev Remem­bers, the former soviet leader writes: “I can’t give an exact figure ­because no one was keeping count. All we knew was that people were dying in enormous numbers.” But Khrushchev (and through him, Stalin) knew the numbers all right. He was ­intimate with Lazar Kaganovich, the party head in Ukraine, and must have talked with him over horilka and salo (vodka and fat back). Historians Timothy Snyder and Robert Conquest also, with insufficient information at their disposal, pegged the number of deaths at around ­five-seven ­million victims.